CampusPress Introduction
Purpose
The purpose of this document is to prepare someone to be able to access their department CampusPress website, familiarize them with CampusPress layout, and then discuss how to make minor edits to the department site.
Useful Resources
1. http://help.edublogs.org/
2. https://www.w3schools.com/html/
3. http://help.edublogs.org/videos/
Getting Started
Each program or organization can request a web site with a URL that looks like:
● sites.centre.edu/
● If you do not already have access to such a page, you can contact ITS by emailing helpdesk@centre.edu and requesting a new site.
EX: sites.centre.edu/physics
Logging In:
1. Go to the URL specified in the Getting Started section.
2. In the top left corner there will be a log in icon.
a. Log in by clicking Use Centre College Account
3. After logging in click on My Sites in the top left hand corner. You can also select the drop down menu associated with your department or organization and then select Dashboard. This opens up the main administration page for managing the website.
Understanding CampusPress Hierarchy
The Dashboard is the page that gives you access to all the editing material. This will be the page you want to start at any time you want to add a page, content, plugin, or appearance.
Left Hand Navigation Pane:
Most Relevant Tabs:
1. Appearance
2. Pages
3. Media
4. Plugins
5. Settings
Other Tabs:
1. Posts
2. Links
3. Users
4. Tools
Every subsection of Appearance is for editing the style of your entire website. For example, the Themes tab lets you select a theme or baseline style that is used to automatically format content as you add it to the site. This style is applied to everything on the website. What a theme entails is discussed below. All other tabs that are a subset of Appearance are for manipulating the theme. When a change is made in these tabs it is reflected throughout the website. So when you add a footer, that footer will show up on every page of your site.
Pages, as the name suggests, allows you to edit a specific page of your website. With Pages you can override style sheets, java script, and add content for a specific page.
Media is for loading content to the server that supports your website. By uploading the content to the server, all content is assigned a new address that your website will always be able to access. This allows the website to display that content.
Plugins can get complicated. What a plugin will specifically impact and how to use it depends on the plugin. The idea behind the plugin is that it adds additional functionality to your website that may be difficult to implement with html, JavaScript, or CSS for those new to web design. The Plugin tab lists all plugins that you can use on your site. If you find a plugin that you would like to use you must select Activate.
Common Actions
Selecting and Manipulating a Theme:
This section is relevant when you first start customizing the website. The theme provides the baseline styling for your website. The content you add to the website is automatically styled to match the theme. Common adjustments you can make are what widgets show up in a navigation pane, site colors, header background, and site identity such as title. Some themes also have a custom CSS option where you can make more specific changes to the theme. This does require that you learn how to use CSS. All these modifications are global. This means that every page in your site will reflect these changes.
Adding Content:
This section is relevant for uploading any content to your site. This includes documents, images, icons, and so on. All of this content should be managed via the Media page.
The following instructions are assuming you are in the Dashboard.
1. Select the Media tab in the navigation pane.
2. Select Add New.
3. At this point you can either drag and drop your files or click select files.
4. This uploads the content to the webserver.
5. Now that the content is uploaded you can find all the content associated with your webpage listed on this page.
6. You can select the icon associated with a given file to pull up the information for that file. This includes the URL assigned to that content. You can then use that URL address to reference the content anywhere in your site.
Pages:
This section is relevant for adding pages to your site as well as managing the hierarchy of those pages on the site.
The following instructions are assuming you are in the Dashboard.
***Select the Pages tab in the left hand navigation pane******
This page lists every page that composes your website including the pages that you have saved as drafts or are marked as not visible to the public. This is where the bulk of the work happens.
Creating/Editing
If you are creating a page, select the “Add New” button in the top left corner. If you are editing a page, just scroll down until you find the page you want to edit and select it.
a. The first form near the top is where you can specify the page title.
b. Right below the title, the URL automatically assigned by CampusPress is listed. We recommend keeping the assigned URL, but you can edit the URL by selecting the edit button at the end of the URL. Just remember you want the URL to be logical so that users can easily find it through the navigation menus.
c. The next form is where the page content will be added. At the top right corner of the form you can select to view the content in a visual form or text form.
Visual form → previews what the page will look actually look like as you edit, making it more intuitive to edit. When working in this setup, it is much like using a simplified Microsoft Word.
Text form → this view is more powerful. This view shows the code behind creating the content for this page. If you have experience in web design, use this view to gain greater control over the final product. The visual view will get the job done but it has some limitations. The text view will just require you do a little more research about what is going on. We recommend using https://www.w3schools.com/html/ as a resource for more detailed information on how to manipulate the style and content of your page.
Page Heirarchy
Naturally, you want to add structure to your website and the way you do that is by assigning parent pages. A standard website with only the default parent page will look something like this:
A website with parent pages will look like:
The parent for Page 1A is Page 1. The parent of Page 3A and 3D is Page 3. When creating or editing a page, on the right hand side there is a section called Page Attributes. One section is the Parent section. In this section you can select the drop down menu listing all of your site’s current pages. From that list you can pick the parent page of the current page. Depending on the selected theme, the website will automatically build the navigation pane to reflect the hierarchy you establish by declaring parent pages:
Permissions
There is another section on the right hand side called Publish. This section gives you the option to preview the current page, set access permissions, view edit history, dispose of the page, and save your current changes.
Update button → saves changes.
Preview button → lets you see how the changes you made will be visible to the user.
Status Edit link → determines if page is visible to others at the moment through the website or not.
Visibility Edit link → allows you to restrict access. The default is public.
For further help
We highly recommend you use the User Guides provided by CampusPress that can be found at the following URL for additional help.
http://help.edublogs.org/user-guide/